Rating: 
Summary: Race-Ing Toward a White Future
Review: This book is helpfull for those who would like to understand cultural assimilation using star trek as a metaphor. Cultural imperalism is a misleading term however, as no one is taking an active role in the expansion of american culture, it is a natural process that comes with being a powerfull economy. Imperalism is the preferd term for those who resent the loss of their culture, but wanted to gain the economic benifits of joining american culture. When in rome do as the romans, or be ostracized, this process is not a quality of american culture, it is universall. However this book was not intended to be a metahphor for cultural imperalism (if that was his intended purpose he should have directly stated so). Its intended purposes was indicting Star Trek as a metaphor for cultural bias and it failed miserably in doing so. He ignored many scripts and episodes which would have undermined his argument. This book was a blatant attempt to sell a few copies of a otherwise boaring book by including verbiage and complicated arguments. I am a black trecker, and I deride attempts to indict a good show just to sell a few copies of a bad book.
Rating: 
Summary: It Boldly Goes....
Review: This was a great book, but not of the genre most Trekkers probably read. No offense meant by that... I am a trekker myself... What I mean is that this is not a technical manual, an encyclopedia, nor a novel meant to flesh out some of the series most memorable charaters. I think a few of the other reviewers here misunderstood that... probably bought the book and then got angry. So be forewarned. This is, instead, an academic book intended to take a serious look at the cultural context in which Star Trek was constructed. This is not a book about Star Trek per se... it is a book about American culture, and the cultural beliefs that we have that allow Star Trek to be such an important part of American -- and even global -- popular culture. The main thesis behind this book is that the way that American thinks about, constructs, and understands the concept of race affects the way that we see "races" in the Star Trek universe. This is a valid thesis, and it is supported well in Bernardi's book. Although I don't want to oversimplify the argument, Bernardi's idea is fairly simple -- we define "progressive" society based on a white American norm.... thus the Trek universe (specifically of the "United Federation of Planets") is the cultural inheritor of American society and al of its goals and ideals. Mutliculturalism, as a Trek (American?) ideal, is there, but embedded within assumptions that people assimilate WITHIN Federation (American?) standards. This is a good book, especially if you are interested in rethinking how we see race in our society, and how it is reflected in popular culture.
Rating:
Summary: The "dialect" of RACE-ING TOWARD A WHITE FUTURE:
Review: When Stephen Mallarme's intention of "donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu" was taken up by the poet T. S. Eliot as the goal of all poetry/literature with any strong potential for critical-thinking and self-reflection: "To purify the dialect of the tribe," it is probably safe to say that the author had something far loftier in mind than Gene Roddenberry did, in his commercial TV-series now a pop-cultural icon and a 'neverending story':Star Trek. The fact that the way we receive, absorb, and are ideologically formed by, exactly the kinds of REPRESENTATIONS our literatures (filmic, textual, or televised) provide us with, is essentially a given; and one which attests to our need for the gifted culture-critic as much in this as in any other domain of the human arts or even sciences. Daniel Bernardi is one such critical thinker. Whether the culturally most important of our popular art forms is "SciFi" and by definition concerned with futurized utopic/dystopic societies with attendant mutations in gender-roles, newly-discovered species/race socializations, and myriad alternative portrayals of ethnicity and/or lifestyles, all ad infinitum (literally), is not really the point of this book. Dr. Bernardi's critical examination lays bare the 'impurities' in the Trek "dialect" deftly and perhaps even points us towards self-serving DIALECTICS inherent to such entities as Paramount, network-television, et al.
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